How Persuasive Marketers Choose The Right Words

A peek behind the curtain into my email laboratory…

Yesterday, I broke down some of my emails for VIP members of my Content Transformation Academy…

…to reveal a few of my content creation strategies and tactics…

…to help them become email marketing masters.

One of the emails: The Dirty Little Secret Newspaper Publishers Don’t Want You to Know

In that email, I tout the benefits of trackable links in print advertisements. 

By the late 1990s, a few smart advertisers created trackable URLs for print — trackable to the publication or even the single ad. 

That answered the question: How many visits is this print ad generating?

Or for the really savvy marketers who sent the print traffic to a lead magnet, the trackable link tells them how many leads the print ad generates.

Note how I refer to “smart advertisers” and “savvy marketers.” 

That’s deliberate. 

I could have written  “Some marketers created trackable URLS for print. Smart move.” (Or something like that)

But I didn’t because…

Persuasive marketers
promote the IDENTITY,
not the action.

I’ll explain with a quick story. 

A few years back, Stanford researchers conducted a study at Bing Nursery School to determine what language would motivate children to clean up a pile of blocks from the playroom floor. 

Researchers asked half the students to “help” clean up. 

They asked the other half to be “helpers” and clean up. 

“Compared to simply asking kids to help, asking kids to be a helper increased helping by almost a third.” 

So says Jonah Berger in his great new book “Magic Words.” (More on that in a moment).

Other studies reveal the same. 

Want to stop smoking? Think of yourself as a “healthy person” (positive identity), rather than a smoker (negative identity) who wants to quit (action). 

Want citizens to vote? Encourage citizens to become voters (identity) rather than vote (action). 

Berger summarizes the point: 

Turn actions into identities. Asking for help or trying to persuade someone to do something? Turn that verb (“Will you help?”) into a noun instead (“Will you be a helper?”). Framing actions as opportunities to confirm desired identities will encourage people to go along.

Well said, Jonah Berger.

You’ve summarized something I’ve been doing for a long time — filling my emails with references to “smart marketers” and “email marketing masters,” and so forth…

…because those are identities my readers wish to embrace.

Speaking of “Magic Words…”

That’s this month’s selection for the Mastermind Book Club. 

Each month, Ted Prodromou and I choose a fantastic book for club members to discuss. In our online club house, members exchange insights about the book. And on the fourth Thursday of the month, we meet live on Zoom to discuss the book. 

This month’s meeting is tomorrow, March 23 at 2:30 pm ET, 1:30 pm CT. 

You don’t have to read the book to join the conversation. 

We’ll discuss lessons drawn from the book and how we can apply them to take business-building action. 

Turning that verb into a noun — that’s just one of many gold nuggets we’ll discuss tomorrow. 

The Club is free to join, and we post replays of all the meetings in the Clubhouse. 

Click the button below to join the Club and get your link to the meeting.